It would make an extremely interesting study if someone actually cataloged the different versions of anti semitism extant in the western world and analyzed the findings. The reasons given for hating Jews vary according to the needs of the hater. Marx said Jews were screwing up communism. Hitler blamed communism on Jewish Bolsheviks. Jews are either pacifist cowards or Zionist murderers, depending on whether you ask skinheads or jihadis.

F’rinstance: Jews control the government so they can control the money. Jews control the money so they can control the government. Jews control the media so they can control the government and the money. And of course, the UN is controlled by Jews, even though it trashes Israel every chance it gets. etc., etc.

The various and conflicting reasons given for hating Jews place them in the category of bogeymen. Every nation has bogeymen. We have them, too. But anti semitism lends itself to hatred across national boundaries.

22 posted on 07/01/2009 2:36:24 PM PDT by sig226
(Real power is not the ability to destroy an enemy. It is the willingness to do it.)

What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense. In the whole of history, it is hard to point to a single occasion when a wave of anti-Semitism was provoked by a real Jewish threat (as opposed to an imaginary one). In Japan, anti-Semitism was and remains common even though there has never been a Jewish community there of any size.

Asked to explain why they hate Jews, anti-Semites contradict themselves. Jews are always showing off; they are hermetic and secretive. They will not assimilate; they assimilate only too well. They are too religious; they are too materialistic, and a threat to religion. They are uncultured; they have too much culture. They avoid manual work; they work too hard. They are miserly; they are ostentatious spenders. They are inveterate capitalists; they are born Communists. And so on. In all its myriad manifestations, the language of anti-Semitism through the ages is a dictionary of non-sequiturs and antonyms, a thesaurus of illogic and inconsistency.